With the increased processing power available on desktop computers and the expanding use of various types of media to present information, computer systems have been developed which combine these two technologies in a network that can selectively distribute audio-visual information from any of a number of sources to individual workstations on the network. Examples of such systems are disclosed in commonly assigned, copending U.S. patent application Ser. Nos. 08/207,779 and 08/207,957, filed Mar. 8, 1994, the disclosures of which are incorporated herein by reference. Generally speaking, the systems disclosed in these applications comprise a number of multimedia workstations and a plurality of audio-visual sources that are connected to one another over two parallel networks. A multichannel A/V network delivers audio-visual information from the sources to the various workstations. A digital data network transmits data and control information between the various workstations, as well as from the workstations to the audio-visual sources.
An arrangement of this type offers a number of features that are particularly useful in classrooms and other educational environments. For example, a teacher can make an announcement to any number of selected students, and can carry on a two-way conversation with any given student. The teacher and the students can watch videos from a multiplicity of different sources, and the teacher can remotely control individual student workstations to receive the video information from a particular source. The teacher is provided with the ability to observe student workstations, as well as to control the operation of any particular workstation. For further information regarding the details of such a system, reference is made to the previously cited patent applications.
The present invention is particularly directed to functions that can be performed at a master workstation on a network of this type. Typically, in a classroom environment the master workstation is controlled by the teacher. In other environments, such as in a business office setting, the master workstation might be under the supervision of a system administrator, or the like.
In a typical classroom or computer laboratory setting, it is desirable to enable the teacher to observe the operations being performed at individual students' workstations. To this end, screen sharing applications have been employed in the past, to permit the teacher to view the same information as that presented on the display monitor of an individual student's workstation, and thereby observe the tasks being carried out by the student. To permit the teacher to observe all of the students in the classroom, or at least some number of them, the application can continuously cycle from one student's display to the next, with a suitable dwell time to permit the teacher to quickly observe the subject matter on the student's screen. It will be appreciated that, in a large classroom, it can take a considerable amount of time to cycle through all of the students' workstations.
To permit the teacher to observe more than one workstation at a time, at least one screen sharing application provides the ability to display a portion of four different remote workstations on the teacher's monitor. In this mode of operation, a portion of one student's screen is displayed in a window at the upper left quadrant of the teacher's monitor, a portion of another student's screen is displayed in a window on the upper right quadrant of the teacher's monitor, and so on for two other student's screens. While this arrangement allows the teacher to observe more than one student at a time, it only gives the teacher partial insight into each of the student's activities. As such, it may not provide the teacher with all relevant information. For example, if the teacher is observing the upper left quadrant of a student's screen, but the student is working with an object located in the lower right portion of the screen, the teacher will not be able to observe the operations being performed by the student without scrolling or resizing a window to show the relevant portion of the student's screen. Accordingly, it is desirable to provide a supervisory system which enables the teacher to observe multiple students at a time, while still giving the teacher an adequate representation of the operations being performed by each student.
In another aspect of these types of systems, the teacher may desire to configure students' workstations to operate in a particular manner. This operation can be carried out by replacing the operating system for a workstation with an updated version thereof. In the past, this type of operation was carried out by physically installing a bootable, removable disk on each workstation, and transferring system software from the removable disk to permanent storage within the workstation. It can be appreciated that in a setting such as a computer laboratory, where a large number of computers are present, the need to physically install the system software on each computer can be quite burdensome and time-consuming. It is desirable to provide an approach in which student workstations can be reconfigured, through the updating of system software, without the need to manually install the software on each individual computer.
Further along these lines, the teacher may desire to open a predetermined document at each workstation for the students to work on, for example at the beginning of a class period. In the past, if the students did not previously store the document at the same location on each of their workstations, it was not possible to open the documents on all of the workstations at one time with a single command from the teacher's workstation. Rather, each student workstation had to be individually accessed by the teacher to open the document. It is desirable to provide a facility by which a document can be opened on any selected workstation with a single command from the teacher's workstation.
To facilitate interaction between the teacher and the students, networked computer systems may include a facility to permit individual students to request attention from the teacher. For example, by entering a particular keystroke combination or selecting a command from a menu, the student can transmit a request for attention from his or her workstation to that of the teacher. The teacher is then prompted to respond to the student's request. When multiple students request attention, the teacher might be provided with a prompt for each individual student. However, no priority is assigned to the various requests. As a result, the teacher might respond to them in a random fashion, unrelated to the order in which they were presented. Consequently, an individual student might have to wait for an unacceptably long period of time before receiving a response to a request for attention.